When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate?
Harold Edmund StearnsStichwörter: equality civilization america individualism repression intellectualism distinction traditions lost-generation conventions second-rate standardisation
I've always found the thousand dollar dinners more unsettling than the twenty-five-thousand dollar ones --- if someone pays the Republican National Committee twenty-five thousand dollars (or, more likely, fifty per couple) to breathe the same air as Charlie for an hour or two, then it's clear the person has money to spare. What breaks my heart is when it's apparent through their accent or attire that a person isn't well off but has scrimped to attend an event with us. We're not worth it! I want to say. You should have paid off your credit-card bill, invested in your grandchild's college fund, taken a vacation to the Ozarks. Instead, in a few weeks, they receive in the mail a photo with one or both of us, signed by an autopen, which they can frame so that we might grin out into their living room for years to come.
Curtis SittenfeldStichwörter: politics elections conventions politician-s-wife
In no time we roll into Sedona proper and find a Cirlce K. The place is full of men with silver ponytails and ratty sandals, old hippie women in loose flowing pants grinning vacantly as they molest the produce, and I am reminded of my old neighborhood in San Francisco. We buy enough fruit and bread and jerked meat for three days, as well as a couple spare handlers of SoCo and a big bottle of cheap Chianti for me. As I'm paying I wonder at how we cling so relentlessly to the little conventions like commerce, as though they can save us.
Ron Currie Jr.Stichwörter: commerce conventions
One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
Gustave FlaubertStichwörter: life beauty society duty unconventional gustave-flaubert madame-bovary conventions rodolphe
He wore a tiny turquoise stud earring I always associated with Dungeons and Dragons types. Men who own ferrets and think magic tricks are cool.
Gillian FlynnStichwörter: nerds dungeons-and-dragons geeks ferrets conventions
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